Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This Bill sets out to change how the entitlements of lone parents will be dealt with after 2 July. I will deal with that in the second part of my contribution. I will focus on what are presented by the Department as technical changes relating to carer's allowance and benefit. We often see Bills coming through with technical issues in them, but they must be looked at in detail to ensure that we tease out their potential negative impacts on people on the ground. When social welfare Bills come through this House, it can often take months or even years for the full consequences of the changes made to be realised. At that stage, it is far too late for people and it is not possible to revisit the decisions made a year or two before. It is vital that we look at the technical amendments to ensure they do not impact negatively on people.

Section 3 contains the two clarifications about dealing with carer's benefit, carer's allowance and the respite care grant, as has been mentioned by other Members. One of the clarifications is to set out the circumstances under which a person will be considered to require full-time care and attention. It seems to be a shift in definition to "full-time care and attention" from the current requirement for "continual supervision and frequent assistance". It might seem like a technical arrangement but it is a subtle change that will make a significant difference in how applications are considered by deciding officers within the Department. That is something that needs to be teased out on Committee Stage and looked at very seriously.

The other change is that the Bill clarifies that a deciding officer can take into consideration the evidence provided by the medical assessor and by the certified medical practitioner of the applicant. That seems to be another change to the emphasis. In my dealings with carer's allowance and interactions with constituents on the matter, there was the means assessment and the medical assessment and if the medical assessor approved the application and the means were okay, the application was accepted. It seems the changes will allow the deciding officer to override the medical assessor's decision on applications. As has been said, that is someone without a medical qualification who only has to take regard of the medical assessor's decision, rather than taking it onboard and acting on it. That is a very dangerous development that will lead to more refusals. It also allows for a subtle change to take place within the Department, maybe an unwritten policy. This is a policy that has been implemented over the last few years. There is a presumption of refusal when an application arrives in the Department, on the basis that people are unlikely to appeal that decision. That is an emphasis within the Department. It leaves thousands of citizens without the supports to which they are entitled.

There is a great deal of work for somebody who wants to access the carer's allowance. The medical assessment form in the application process is difficult to navigate and it is difficult to get a full medical report from a GP to ensure the application is as strong as possible. Some arbitrary decisions appear to be made within the process itself and then applicants must go further, getting psychiatric evaluations, school reports, reports from consultants, and so on, incurring costs in the process. The deciding officers are getting additional responsibility and decision-making powers over the medical assessors in the Department. That is something we have to look at seriously. I agree with FLAC that this provision should be removed completely from the Bill. This may be designed to speed up decision-making in the Department but there will be more wrong decisions as a result. In 2013 there were 56,000 applications to the Department of Social Protection that required a medical assessment, while at any one time there were only 21.8 medical assessors assessing applications. That works out at around 2,500 applications per assessor per year, which is a huge burden to place on them. That is what is slowing down the decision-making process, rather than a need to make these changes to allow deciding officers to overrule medical assessors. We need to recruit more medical assessors to ensure the proper decisions are being taken.

If one is working from a presumption of refusal at the start, one does not want to employ more medical assessors, one wants to make the technical changes included in this Bill. This is highlighted particularly by the fact that in the first ten months of 2013, 8,917 applications for carer's allowance were refused. Of those, only 3,426 were appealed. There is a success rate of over 32% on appeals regarding carer's allowance and carer's benefit. That shows there is something wrong with the decision-making process within the Department. There is no way that so many applications should be successful on appeal. Based on the success rates of the appeals in 2013, almost 2,000 citizens did not get what they were entitled to from an application they made to the Department in respect of carer's benefit and carer's allowance alone. The overall figures in 2013 were that 55% of appeals were successful and the Department's decision was overturned. That shows there is something wrong in the Department. If the application system is working properly in the first instance, no appeals system should have a 55% success rate. It does not make sense.

This is something that needs to be looked at seriously. It shows that the presumption is, as has been shown in this Bill, negative at the start of the process and people must prove their entitlement on that basis. That is a shift that has taken place. If one looks even at the number of appeals and how the social welfare appeals office workload has increased significantly over the last four or five years, with the volume of appeals probably tripling, it shows that change has taken place. Now we are going to enshrine it in legislation.

Regarding lone parent and jobseeker's transitional payments, what will happen on 2 July has been outlined succinctly by a number of Members. My reading of the situation is that only lone parents who are at work will be penalised. Lone parents who do not have jobs will be just as well off after July. I listened to the Taoiseach on Leaders' Questions last week referring to a readjustment in figures and payments. It showed that he did not have a clue about what would happen in respect of lone parents in July.

Turning to the Tánaiste, the impression has been given that people are making the lifestyle choice to join and stay on social welfare and not to bother with work. As Deputy Joan Collins outlined, however, 53% of lone parents are already in the workplace. They are the ones who will be impacted by these changes after July. In most cases, they will lose the price of their child care, which means that the changes will have the reverse effect. The Tánaiste claimed that they would encourage people into work, but they will actually put them out of work. People will not be able to afford to stay in work. What will come to pass will match the Opposition's analysis: lone parents' payments will be reduced, they will suffer under extra child care costs and they will be forced out of work.

It is sickening that, when these issues were highlighted by this side of the House in budget 2012, the now Tánaiste made the sweeping statement that the changes would not be implemented until we had a Scandinavian-type child care system. We are a long way off that, yet we will create Irish-style unemployment for lone parents by forcing them out of work through changes to the system instead of making it easier for them to stay in work by providing them with proper child care and supports within the system.

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